It has quite obviously been brought to my attention that there have been some discrepancies regarding my most recent update of Three Wishes. For those of you who don’t know what those discrepancies are, I’d advise you to take a trip to the home page of this website where all of these issues have been put on display with all of the legitimacy of the cover of a National Enquirer tabloid.

The only reason that I have decided against simply vanishing from here without a word (which I did consider) is because I do owe myself, and all of you guys that have been reading my shit, more than that.

Despite the obnoxious compare and contrast that was created and posted, I did not plagiarize. I have been a huge fan of FictionLyn since I was about 14 years old and IOM is a story that, at that particular time in my life, held a lot of meaning and resounded deeply emotionally for me. I would not do her the disservice of attempting to recreate it.

I also won’t sit here and insult any of your intelligence, because there were obviously similarities. But—as any of you who have been reading TW know—I was out of the country and I was using a dial-up connection. So the probability that I might have sat and blown my parents’ phone bill out of the fucking water so that I could copy FictionLyn and get caught doing it, is slim to none.

There is also the issue of exactly which parts of the story I have been accused of plagiarizing. Because if I copied IOM, then I also copied a million different books and movies. And if that’s so, I extend my deepest apologies to every author and every screenwriter and every playwright that has ever written anything like it. I would also like to apologize to anybody that might have actually been kidnapped and escaped at some point in their lives, because maybe I copied the idea for my story from your true story in the newspaper. Again, my sincerest apologies.

I do apologize to all of the fans of TW and anything else that I have written for this inconvenience, and I also extend those apologies to FictionLyn.

Had I received any sort of “warning� e-mail, I would have obviously responded. To think that I might have gotten an e-mail that accused me of plagiarizing and blatantly ignored it is completely fucking ridiculous. And for that reason only, I have decided that I won’t be a part of this archive anymore. I have been here for a long time and it seems as if I was hugely mistaken as to what type of community this was. To be so harshly and obnoxiously accused of something without so much as a warning is absolutely unbelievable. I refuse to participate in it especially when there are so many stories on this site that are, if not exact replicas of others, then really fucking close.

And to be perfectly honest, art and anything that any of us claim to “create� is always an imitation. We imitate the world around us in our art, we imitate other forms of art, we imitate the authors before us. That’s how it works. And the person that has taken it upon themselves (because I’m not even sure what your name is) to slander everything that I’ve written without so much as questioning me first, has probably done the same.

I’m really sorry to anyone that might have been affected by this, and I do thank you all for everything… you’ve all helped me grow significantly as a writer and I love most of you.

I hope you all keep writing… I certainly will. And just so there aren’t anymore “e-mail� issues, if anyone feels the need to contact me you can do so at morkles@aol.com .

It’s been a pleasure knowing all of you.

Bests,
S